Great Moments in the Life of a Cyclist

Rites of Passage

Falling in puppy love, graduating high school, the birth of your child--nothing compared with your first case of road rash and these 108 other momentous occasions in the life of a cyclist

bicycling staff and contributors

(Photo by Colin Erie)

01. REALIZING THAT THE HILLISN'T IN THE WAY; it is the way.

An essay by Mark Levine

So, there was this hill.

It didn't look like much. It was called Mount Sentinel, and its western slope, hovering over my new hometown, Missoula, Montana, was treeless and dun-colored and suggested the lumpy mass of a sleepy, overfed dog. Halfway up, a giant whitewashed "M" was emblazoned on its face, and standing before it in the sharp northern light of late-afternoon August, I could see a few dozen figures—children, oldsters and house pets among them—ambling upward on switchbacks. The hill seemed as forbidding as a neighborhood playground.

I got on my bike.

I had just arrived in Missoula. I was in my mid-20s, but I had never before been to the Rockies, and I was eager to learn how it would feel to put some "mountain" under the wheels of my mountain bike. Oh, that bike: I had bought it three years earlier, in 1989, when it seemed that everyone was dumping their road bikes for hulking bush-crashers. It was steel gray, weighed a little less than a house and was impervious to abuse. I loved it. It had restored me to the anarchic childhood joys of bike riding, when being on two wheels meant going all-out, disregarding the distinctions among pavement, grass and mud, and returning home late, filthy and not infrequently battered.

I'll admit I rode places where I was not welcome. When I lived in Iowa, I was scolded by bird-watchers and farmers. In Kentucky, I ventured onto red-dirt roads, winding through tobacco patches and bean fields, and following disused skid trails through the woods. Those were simpler times. I owned one pair of cycling shorts, but preferred cutoff jeans and Converse sneakers stuffed into toe clips, and I gripped the handlebar with a pair of weight-lifting gloves. I rode all the time. But what I didn't know was that I didn't know what a mountain was.

I was about to find out. I rode toward the M, then past it, pedaling out of Missoula along an old railroad embankment skirting the north side of the mountain, looking for a bikeable uphill path. After a few miles, I came to a logging road that cut into the mountain's backside. I turned in, and without warning the road climbed sharply. I had no time to build speed, and was, on principle, too stubborn to shift to my rarely used lowest gears. I was not a stranger to hills, of course; even the flatlands dip and rise. But I regarded hills as a momentary nuisance, an occasion to stand on my pedals, grit my teeth, and get done with it in a short-lived and profane anaerobic tantrum. It was clear now that that approach had met the limits of its usefulness. I found myself grinding to a dead stop. I sprang from the saddle and fought to turn my legs. Still, I was barely moving. The reading on my computer flickered between zero and 4 mph. I had a vision of being forced to dismount and walk uphill, and the indignity of it kept me straining against the pedals and inching along. I suspect that my panting disturbed wildlife. By the time I made it up that first pitch—it was scarcely 500 yards—I knew I was no longer in Iowa. I felt like someone who had learned how to swim at a spa and had now been thrown into the open sea.